Sunday, April 20, 2014

Today we're releasing Qubes OS R2 rc1 (release candidate), which is expected to be the last milestone before the final Qubes OS R2 release. As mentioned previously today's release is bringing mainly UI improvements and polishing and lots of bugfixes, as well as some last new features:

Both Dom0 and VMs have been upgraded to Fedora 20.

Support for full templates download via two new repo definitions: templates-itl and templates-community. With a bit of imagination we could call it Qubes “AppStore” for VMs :) Currently we have only published one template there – the new default fc20-based template, but we plan to upload more templates in the coming weeks (such as the community-produced Arch Linux and Debian templates). Even though we have a separate repo for community contributed templates, we still plan on building those templates ourselves, from (contributed) sources.

Support for running Windows AppVMs in “full desktop” mode with support for arbitrary window resizing (which automatically adjusts the resolution in the VMs).

Support for on-the-fly switching between the “full desktop” and “seamless” modes for Windows AppVMs.

The last two features require, of course, our proprietary Qubes Windows Tools to be installed in the Windows AppVMs to work, which new version we have also published to the new repositories for R2rc1.

We support smooth upgrading for current Qubes R2 Beta 3 users – the procedure is very simple, yet it will take some hours because of the Dom0 distro upgrading.

As can be seen in our ticketing system, there really are only few minor cosmetic tasks left before the final Qubes R2 release. It is expected that upgrade from today's release to the final R2 will be very simple and quick – just standard updates installation.

As usual, the detailed installation and upgrade instructions, as well as the HCL, can be found here. Note however, that the HCL for the today's release will take some days/weeks to compile, as we need to wait for reports from the community, and so for this time the HCL for the previous release (R2 Beta 3) should be used instead. It is reasonable to expect that the new HCL will be a subset of the previous one.

Also, as usual, please keep in mind that we don't control the servers from which the ISO is being served and so please always make sure to verify the digital signature on the downloaded ISO before installing it.